PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 633 
the male—an idea, it may be remarked, which presents no impossibility to the 
minds of very primitive races, some of whom even at this day do not connect 
fertilisation and conception as cause and effect. With her son she produced all 
life: she gave her son to the humanity so created, and humanity killed him that 
it might live; he revived and returned again to his mother, was again killed, and 
so the cycle of the seasons revolved. So far as concerns Him in all his avatars 
Mr. Frazer's book may be consulted. As for Her, a Woman still holds the same 
place in the religious belief of the old races of the same region, wherever they 
have escaped assimilation by conquering races and faiths from beyond the border. 
Hear any Greek or Italian peasant in a moment of excitement or danger. He calls 
on no Person of the Trinity, but on the Virgin. For him her power does not come 
from her Motherhood of her Son. Indeed, I have known Christian countrymen of a 
West Anatolian valley to whom that motherhood was evidently unknown, and 
when spoken of remained without interest or significance. She is a self-sufficient, 
independent embodiment of divinity, to whom the ruder folk of Mediterranean 
lands offer their prayers and pay their vows alone. She and no other is beseeched 
to grant increase and fertility; she and no other is credited with the highest 
direction of human affairs, But to say, as so often is said, that, for instance, in 
Greek lands the Panaghia is simply a survival of Artemis or Aphrodite under 
another name, is to convey a false impression. She stands for the same principle 
of divinity as they; she has taken on, as I shall point out presently, even the 
feasts and the ritual of her predecessor ; and she has often made peculiarly her own 
the spots especially sacred to the earlier Mother-Goddess. But, as I take it, she 
is not worshipped now in Ephesus or Cyprus merely because there was once a 
dominant cult of Artemis or Aphrodite in those places, but because to the peoples 
of a wide Mediterranean region it is still, as it always was, a religious necessity 
to embody their idea of divinity in the feminine ; and I would state the relation 
of the Christian Virgin-Goddess to the pagan one rather in this way—that, 
coming from without, she gained acceptance at once for herself, and probably also, 
in a great measure, gained acceptance for the whole creed with which she was 
connected, because she offered a possible personification of the same principle 
which had always been dominant in the local religion. 
Why that principle was so deeply rooted in the peoples of this particular 
region I cannot pretend precisely to say. To ascribe it, as has been suggested, to 
the original prevalence of Mutterrecht is probably to mistake effect for cause. 
The principle has its roots deeper down than even the matriarchal system. In a 
general way we may hold it the result of a peculiar mental concentration upon 
the idea of generation and reproduction of life, upon the increase of man, the 
brute creation, and the earth. In these processes the more obvious part played by 
the female in Nature inevitably tends among primitive peoples, who are com- 
paratively peaceful and more of agriculturists and herdsmen than warriors or 
hunters, to make woman seem the sole condition of their being and the pre- 
dominant arbiter of their destinies. More we can hardly say. We cannot 
determine whether there were peculiar geographical conditions in the dawn of 
time, which, either in some other home or in the Eastern Mediterranean region 
itself, predisposed the ancestors of the actual races of the latter to this cult of the 
reproductive force. One can but bear witness that at the present day this idea is 
an obsession of these inhabitants wherever they remain in a comparatively simple 
state of society. All their thoughts, their prayers, and their actions seem to be 
inspired by it, and of all their thoughts, their prayers, and their actions—so far as 
they have not been warped to the Father-God of the Southern Semites by the 
armed pressure of an alien folk from the warlike steppes of Northern Asia— 
Mary, the Panaghia, is the focus. ; 
In her essential identification with the religious sense ot these peoples, there- 
fore, the Virgin is no mere survival. But in an accidental or secondary sense her 
actual personality may, perhaps, be so regarded in the region in question if we 
are careful to exclude from the word all connotation of superfluity or decaying 
energy. Her cult may be brought under that body of beliefs, observances, and 
practices which have demonstrably passed from earlier religious systems to later 
